Configuring Raspberry Pi Wireless with Realtek RTL8188CUS

After suggestion from one of my friend who uses Raspberry Pi for his experiments, I bought one. I am running all my downloads through my Pi without having my laptop running for long hours earlier. In order to make my Pi connected to a my airport drive I bought Netgear Wireless USB Micro adapter.

After connecting this to my Pi, as mentioned in lot of forums I used lsusb command to list down the usb devices connected to my Pi. It listed down the device as below

Bus 001 Device 004: ID 0846:9041 NetGear, Inc. WNA1000M 802.11bgn [Realtek RTL8188CUS]

But when I checked the ip address using (ifconfig) of the wlan0 devices, I noticed that it doesn’t had it.

In order to have the device connected to my Airport Extreme, I changed the /etc/network/interfaces file as below

auto lo

iface lo inet loopback
iface eth0 inet dhcp

allow-hotplug wlan0

auto wlan0

iface wlan0 inet dhcp
wpa-ssid “XXXXXX-XXXXXX”
wpa-psk “XXXXXXXXX”

Replace the XXXX in wpa-ssid with your wireless network name and XXXXX in wpa-psk with the password. After making changes reboot the device or reboot your network service. Now you should have connected your Raspberry Pi wirelessly to your network.